thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

Monday, November 2, 2015

How Change Happens

Yesterday’s
post was sparked off by a book and a paper with this title. Kzarnic’s paper was written in 2007 (although I came
across only yesterday in the book) and is simply the best introduction to the
topic I have come across – identifying what for him are the core approaches
which the various intellectual disciplines offer to explain change – whether
that change is described as “technical”, “economic”, “political” or “organizational”.
And adding some multi-disciplinary approaches for good measure….

Green’s
book focuses on one very small part of the picture - “people power” in poor
“developing” countries, emphasizing right from the start that -

Activists seeking social and political change
usually focus their efforts on those who wield visible power, presidents, prime
ministers and CEOs, since they hold apparent authority over the matter at hand.
Yet the hierarchy of visible power is underpinned by subtle interactions among
a more diverse set of players. Hidden power‘ describes what goes on behind the
scenes: the lobbyists, the corporate chequebooks, the Old Boys Network.

Hidden
power also comprises the shared view of what those in power consider sensible
or reasonable in public debate. Any environmentalist who has sat across the
table from government officials or mainstream economists and dared to question
the advisability of unlimited economic growth in a resource-constrained world
will have met the blank faces that confront anyone breaching those boundaries.

I’m long
enough in the tooth to have seen many times the “conventional wisdom” of
everyday conversation become a forgotten tale and am constantly amazed by how
easily people move from one discredited world view to another without beginning
to develop some scepticism about that conventional wisdom……

Yesterday’s
post tracked my own journey of discovery about “change” and power – first as a
Scottish politician working with
community groups, political colleagues, official advisers, academics and
journalists; and, since 1990, as a consultant working to European bureaucracy and with
Central European and Central Asian technocrats and politicians – local and
national – all the time trying to keep up with the burgeoning relevant
literature in fields such as “managing change”, “institutional reform” and
“developing capacities”

This
experience suggests that there are actually four very different bodies of thinking and writing about “change – and how it happens” - each
using different language and each with different audiences and loyalties…..

- Managing Change–
the “management of change” literature was written by management consultants
looking for markets and hit a peak about 15 years ago. The
ultimate business guru book is an excellent introduction to the people and
ideas on which that genre drew. Critical
management studies (CMS) was an interesting (if badly written) radical academic
response to the overfocus of those writings on senior business executives with
power and authority.

- State Reform–
it’s amazing to realisethat Public Sector
Reform (PSR) is only about 25 years old….the writings come almost exclusively
from academics and consultants and either ape that of change management; or of
the deconstructionists of CMS. Increasingly the literature on “change” has been
coming from state bodies (national and international) such as The World Bank,
OECD, Asian Development Bank, ODI etc and is addressed to senior officials,
academics (and journalists?)…

- The White Heat
of Technology– everyone’s great hope in
the face of the environmental and financial disasters (which people have
eventually understood) now face the world….We are overwhelmed by the books
which all sorts of people have been pouring out in the past decade giving us
the stories of the technological, economic and social forces which produced
(and change) the world in which we now live.

Coincidentally,
the first thing I found in this morning’s surfing was a presentation by Chris
Martenson’s about his Crash
course – a full version of which can be accessed here. That single
hour’s viewing told me more than I had learned in the several hours it took me
last week to read Naomi Klein’s This
Changes Everything.

The
presentation nicely complemented last week’s reading of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations - a book which has apparently been making waves in Europe. His basic argument is that
the wave of the future is joint-ownership
and his
bookcelebrates
those companies (some quite large) which have adopted that principle and
identifies some of the preconditions, systems and procedures which seem to
account for its success.

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.